About Pablo

My name is Paul Adams. My friends call me Pablo.

I was born in Los Angeles (Hollywood, Kaiser Hospital) and raised in Los Angeles. The youngest of three.

I graduated from the eighth grade at St. Agatha, then Westchester High School and Los Angeles Harbor College. Athletic scholarships took me to the University of Hawaii and Utah State, and I finished at California Lutheran University with a degree in sociology.

Football and the grace of God got me an education and a degree.

Football taught me one of the first lessons that stuck. In high school. You can walk off the field sure you played the best game of your life. Then Monday comes. Film day. The tape tells you the truth. In other words, feedback.

I learned to hate feedback. You couldn’t argue with it. You couldn’t refute it. It was the only honest thing in the room.

What I didn’t realize at the time (youth) was that I was being prepared. Prepared to hear feedback. Prepared to take it in and use it. Because that’s how you survive in corporate America.

Or, as the coaches put it: get ready for next week’s game.

Change Moments

My story after college is a simple one.

I graduated, moved back home, and had two glorious weeks of bliss. Then my mother killed it. Go here. Fill out an application. Get A Job!

So I did. I went down, took the test, and became a Medicare claims examiner trainee. Twenty-five years old. Fresh out of college. Starting out in corporate America.

No problem, I thought. I’ll work for the summer, save some money, quit this dumb job, and go do something fun with my life.

That was a thirteen-year-long summer.

Like any ambitious, educated dummy, I worked my way up the food chain. All was good. Then the company called a big meeting. They were moving out of state. So was my job.

My first big Change moment. (Actually not the first, but the story has to start somewhere.)

We looked at our options and moved to a small Central California town instead. I got a job with a major corporation, and like a dummy, I worked my way up the food chain again. Eleven years. All was great. Then WHAM!

Another big meeting. A new word in our vocabulary: “Transition.”

In corporate English, “Transition” means downsizing, closing offices, your job is moving, and hold on to your butts.

Another Change moment. Do we see a pattern here?

Somewhere along the way I moved from the business side into IT, and I stayed more than 25 years. That gave me real-world skills to excel in networks and systems across insurance, healthcare, and county government. I earned certifications from Microsoft, CompTIA, Novell, and Cisco. Every one of them was the same deal. Study a little every day. Lab it. Fail a practice test. Study again. Cisco was the hardest. None of it happened in three weeks.

In my fifties, in the middle of yet another Change moment, I started Pablos HelpDesk. I was tired of going through these Change moments with nowhere to turn. So I built a place for people like me.

Still Taking Tests

I retired in 2023. Now I am studying again, earning AI certificates from Microsoft, IBM, and Google. Still taking tests.

I’m 70 now. Proud, blessed, unworthy, and thankful. I never thought I would get here. I was as much in control as I could be. The rest, I learned to survive, circumvent, improvise, adapt, and overcome.

Plan on getting old. Despite your best efforts, you just might get there.

This site was my very first domain. It has been a lot of different things over the years. Now it is getting back to what it should have been all along.

Not quick fixes. Not slogans on a poster. The habits, beliefs, and daily practices that actually hold up when life gets hard — and the research that shows why.

Everything here is organized around four things:

• Confidence & Self-Worth
• Belief Systems & Resilience
• Habits & Discipline
• Well-Being Practices

When I cite a study, I link to it, so you can check it yourself. When I share something from my own life, it happened.

Change is coming either way. You don’t have to go through it alone.

Welcome to the HelpDesk.